Waching daily May 29 2017

We are Team NAIST-Panasonic,

an international team based in Japan, at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology,

and in May we won the 1st place at the Airbus Shopfloor Challenge at ICRA 2016.

After our success, Panasonic proposed to jointly participate in the Amazon Robotics Challenge.

Naturally, we said "Absolutely, yes!".

The most important part of our approach is that we are prepared to deal with failure.

In unstructured environments, there will always be uncertainty.

Recognition can fail, grasping can fail, and suddenly everything goes wrong.

That' is why we designed our system to deal with failure.

First, after the robot grasps an item, it moves to a transit recognition space.

There, an array of cameras takes multiple pictures of the item

to be sure that we have the correct one, and to confirm its orientation.

Next, we use weight sensors under the shelf, totes and boxes.

These sensors can detect if the robot placed correctly the item,

or if an item fell out of the storage system.

On the gripper, we use pressure and force sensors

to detect if the grasp was successful.

So we have multiple ways to detect if the grasp was successful,

if we have the correct item, and that no other item fell out of the storage system.

Finally, we use a sensitive robot with force feedback that can stop upon collision.

Even if something goes wrong during the competition,

the robot can stop safely, and continue the attempt.

At our last competition, our biggest advantage was our design.

We anticipated errors that no other team did,

and we delivered consistently improving performance.

At the Amazon Robotics Challenge,

we will do it again!